Ann Lyuwenyu Zhang

Dissertation

Title: Keeping Other Memories: Inside Contemporary Off-Archives of Chinese Moving Image History

Supervisor: Zhen Zhang

My dissertation examines and theorizes the culture and history of unofficial Chinese-language film archives to challenge the conventional ways of remembering audiovisual history while complicating the very definition of archive itself. Embracing various unique archival practices from seven unofficial film archives in three countries, this dissertation asks not what we can find in an archive, but what is missing, resurfacing, and difficult to preserve. Thus, it expands the contemporary conversation on moving image archiving from a transnational, media archaeological, and human-centered perspective that decenters the nation-states and reshapes our understanding of how precarious and ephemeral memories are creatively preserved.

Bio

Ann Lyuwenyu Zhang is a PhD candidate in the department of Cinema Studies at New York University. She received her MA from the University of Southern California and her BA from Emerson College. Ann Lyuwenyu’s primary research interests center around film archives, early cinema, film preservation, and East Asian studies. She is also interested in the intersection of Deaf culture and media studies. She has published book reviews in The Moving Image and Film Quarterly, and has an upcoming article in The Moving Image.